Being small (and nimble) has worked tremendously well for Swift Prosys, with managing director and founder Mohan Thas Shanmugam busy targeting clients and markets that are often overlooked (and underserved) by the bigger solutions providers. “We have established a roster of clients in very diverse markets such as Canada, South Africa, Australia, Scandinavia, and soon, hopefully, the Middle East.”

But communicating the technical parts of the digitization process can be a daunting task when there are language barriers. With that in mind, one of his project managers took the initiative to learn French for a year to better supervise projects from France and Canada, and to promote Swift Prosys at the Paris and Quebec book fairs. “One French media company now puts through about 50,000 pages a month for online e-paper production, for which the turnaround time can range from one to 48 hours depending on complexity,” says Shanmugam, whose team has rich experience in this segment, having processed and archived millions of newspaper and magazine pages in the past couple of years.

A recent archival project, for instance, saw the team converting trade directories dating back to 1910 for a Scandinavian client. The 120,000 pages were OCR-ed, cleaned, corrected, and converted into XML using RegEx. The final delivery was in ePub2, which was processed automatically from the XML files. “We also had many HTML5 projects in the past year, and that has prompted us to develop a training program on these markup languages, as well as on animation and gaming, where we are seeing more inquiries from different markets.”

For Shanmugam, the lack of resources to establish sales offices in every market that he serves is a good thing as he embarks on a series of partnerships with local companies. “We have partnered with a consulting firm in Italy, for instance, to service government institutions, universities, and libraries in Europe, and with one company in Senegal to further pro-mote our digitization services in West Africa. It works very well because I can rely on my partners who have the local knowledge and network to do their part in marketing and after sales servicing while my team focuses on the production and technical processes.”